


Triptych

by Alley_Skywalker



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-22 14:36:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13168998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/pseuds/Alley_Skywalker
Summary: The three loves of Natasha Rostov.





	Triptych

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Monochromely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monochromely/gifts).



i. Andrei

Andrei is a dream, a girlish fantasy come to life in the light of candles to the straining music of a waltz.

When she first agrees to marry him, she does not love him. She does not _know_ him, the same as she never truly knew Boris Drubetskoy before him or Anatole Kuragin after him. She loved the idea of him more than the man himself – his word-weary face, his epaulets, his mature and grow-up words and manners. She loved that he was enchanted with her. 

She loved him later. 

Later, after they had had nearly three months to become acquainted, when he came to visit her nearly every day and she played the piano and sang for him. She understood that he saw her soul and that he did not laugh at its facies but cherished them. And that made her love him. Girlish, vain and fickle, perhaps, but so very true. 

After everything, she loved him better. 

Before, before the war, he had seen her heart, but she had not seen his. It was only until he lay dying with his hand in hers and his eyes both seeing and unseeing all at once, that she saw beyond his noble bearing and his upstanding manner. She saw a man with a heart rendered weary by life and by his own flaws and failures. And she loved his heart the way he had loved her soul. 

And she loved him true until his last, dying breath.

 

ii. Marya

Marya was an angel, sent by God from heaven to ease her grief and guide her through the darkness to a new light. 

It was as f the years and Andrei’s death had broken something that had strained between them earlier. They fell into each other’s arms as sisters on reunion, and kept each other close as bosom friends in their despair. 

And then. And then Natasha lost herself in the warmth of a light she could not fathom, could not understand – she knew only that it came upon her slowly, like a winter dawn, a sun that knows it is not meant to last in such a season, so it comes up slowly, taking its time as if to buy a minute longer for itself. 

She never burned with Marya, not even in the fairytale like fancy as she did with Andrei. But she was like a moth to the flame of Marya’s luminous eyes and her gentle voice. Natasha loved her hands and the softness of her cheeks. She loved the comfort of Marya knowing all her grief and sharing her burden. She loved with that strange understanding that she knew not what this love meant and that there was no polite word for it, but that it was as true to her as anything had ever been. 

And when she kissed Marya’s lips amidst the early-spring buds in the garden, and Marya pressed a hand to the spot, eyes wide and uncertain, Natasha knew that it could not be wrong. She always knew, deep down, when a thing was wrong, and this was not. 

She loved Marya the way she might have loved Andrei had he lived. And yet, not the same at all. 

 

iii. Pierre

Pierre was real, the way nothing else had ever been. Not simply _true_ but real – grounded, firm, concrete. Something to hold on to, something that would last. 

Natasha gave him her hand and her heart with a full knowledge of what it meant. She gave him her hand and her heart with all the weight of her life and heartbreak behind it. She wondered, sometimes, if he knew how much she had changed since before the war. She wondered, sometimes, if he loved the memory of her more that who she had become. 

But Pierre had changed too, and together they took those changes and made a life out of them, built a home and family into the voids in their lives left by those who had been taken from them. She loved him like she loved herself, for he was a part of her, integral and complete. They were two people, but joined in marriage, they formed one whole where every part of their lives intertwined and intermingled to the extent that neither could any longer distinguish where the essence of one of them began and where it ended. 

She loved him as she never loved before or after – not as passionately, not as ravenously, but with a slow, steady fire that could get them through even the darkest and longest night.


End file.
